A boulder field may seem a strange place to take someone with short, fat, hairy legs – particularly if some of the boulders are the size of cars. But the boulder field at the foot of the Wastwater Screes is something else. Even taking into account the scrambling and disappearing down cracks in the rock it just shouldn’t be missed.

The hairy legs in question of course belong to Robson and, as ever, he’s accompanied on this excursion by a fine figure of a border terrier.

Your first view of the Screes will probably be from the valley road with the lake in the foreground. Impressive, slightly sinister. But once you walk round the foot of Wastwater over Lund Bridge and pick up the lakeside path you get a whole new perspective of this geological marvel. A wall of tinkling, shifting rock rears up above you to a broken-toothed and ragged skyline. It’s one of the most mysterious places in the whole of Lakeland; a multi-faceted mirror of stone that reflects the weather in all its changing lights and plunges to the floor of the district’s deepest lake.

There’s a good path across the scree for most of the length of the lake until you hit the boulder fields. They look nothing from across the water but close up and very personal they’re a challenge. Wainwright describes it as “a vicious quarter-mile” where “progress is slow, laborious and just a little dangerous”. I tell you, he should try being a border terrier. Even with four feet in contact with the smoothed rock there was a bit of undignified slipping and sliding going on over the worst of it.

But then you’re through it, Wasdale Head Hall Farm is just up ahead and you’re just a couple of miles from a welcoming bowl of clear Wasdale water at the door of the Wasdale Head Inn. Robson prefers a pint of Great Gable produced in their micro-brewery but as we know beards and taste have never gone together.